Having grown up in Brooklyn, baseball analogies come naturally to me. They can be gender specific, however, excluding half the audience. Can we agree on softball, which is as associated with girls and women as well as boys and men?
O.K. Then let's think of philosophy of education as something like softball. Like all forms of scholarship, it is a team sport. Every player is deeply dependent on others, to provide fodder, supporting arguments, data, responses and counter-arguments. To think of philosophers of education on analogy with weight lifters, competing against one another as individuals, is a deep fallacy.
On the softball field players on the team are assigned positions: infielder, outfielder, catcher, etc. What are the positions in philosophy of education? And how does that help us understand the scholarship of engagement?
Following yesterday's comment about experimental logic and the scholarship of engagement, we can assign many different positions on the philosophy of education team.
Some philosophers of education are sentinels. Their role or position is to stay attuned to developments in other education games, played outside of university scholarship: schooling, teaching, policy making, youth culture to name a few. These sentinels bring the news back to our field in the form of communications attuned to the norms of academic communication and publication. These philosophers may get a lot of their news second hand, from popular writers such as Jonathan Kozol. But some of the sentinels have to get out into the field, into these other games, as participant observers, or the field will inevitably suffer input bias. We can't just take Jonathan's word for everything.
And to be clear, Jonathan Kozol is a superstar in another game but he is not a philosopher of education. He is not a member of our team; he doesn't play in our games, or by our rules; he doesn't speak our language. To get his insights into our game he needs one of us to take them on and shape them as philosophical communications.
Once inside the university as the house of inquiry, the data, insights and ideas from these external practices are subjected to various forms of philosophical study. Some philosophers make analyses of problematic concepts, others make normative arguments, to name two among several typical forms of study. In doing so they both draw upon the works of other members of the philosophy of education team and respond to these others, and depend upon the responses of these others to their own work. We may think of these inside-the-field or intra-field studies, published as the typical articles in Educational Theory or Studies in Philosophy and Education, or the Journal of Philosophy of Education, as the core of philosophy of education, but in doing so we have to remember that the core of the apple is hardly the most important part.
Philosophy of education may be a branch of philosophy, but, as Randy Curren argued in last week's Philosophy of Education Society meeting in Cambridge Massachusetts, philosophy is all branches and no trunk now. If we hope to go to something called "mainstream philosophy" to solidify our work, we will be disappointed to find nothing there. Whether in the American Philosophical Association or elsewhere, there are just folks more or less like ourselves, doing many different things. Solid foundations may be sought by some more than others, but none are on offer.
One important kind of position on the philosophy of education team, then, are the in-fielders, those fielding materials from within professional philosophy. The in-fielders are attentive to and knowledgable about work in other branches of philosophy. Some, like Ken Strike, keep their eye on developments in systematic ethics. Others, like Harvey Siegel, attend to epistemology. Still others, like Michael Peters and Jim Marshall, monitor contemporary continental philosopers.
At the meeting in Cambridge Harvey Siegel argued that the philosophers of education playing these in-fielder roles should, to test or prove themselves, also play in the philosophical games they monitor for us. If you are our ethics man, or post-structuralist feminist woman, Harvey thinks, you should authenticate yourself by moonlighting in ethics or poststructural feminism. If you pass their peer review processes, we'll know that you know what you are talking about so we can take your word for what you say about those fields.
Some in-fielders should no doubt do this, just as some sentinel philosophers of teaching should occasionally teach school classes, and some philosophers of curriculum should get occasionally get involved in curriculum projects. There are, however, many ways of observing and associating with others that don't require full participation as insiders in their games. And philosophers of education have many ways of assessing the input colleagues bring in from other branches of philosophy. We don't have to rely entirely upon their peer-review processes.
Once upon a time philosophy was considered an autonomous, self-contained discipline. I am not sure anyone thinks this today. Philosophical studies often draw on insights from other disciplines and fields, especially the other humanities disciplines like history and literary studies, the social sciences, and educational research. Those who monitor work in these fields and report back to us in philosophical communications we may think of as our inter-fielders.
All philosophers occasionally think about what they are doing, how to go about doing it, and how it fits both on the map of knowledge and the map of practice. These are known as meta-inquiries. We all entertain random meta-thoughts, write them in our journals, exchange them in conversations in the halls at conferences. Some meta-reflections take the form of philosophical communications. The session Randy Curren and Harvey Siegel addressed at PES on the relations between philosophy of education and mainstream philosophy was meta-philosophical. There is even a special journal, Metaphilosophy, for such communications. Some philosophers of education may work mostly at the meta-level, as meta-philosophers .
Just as the field needs sentinels on the input side to maintain a strong connection to the real world outside the university, it also needs its effectors on the output end, digesting and synthesizing philosophical results and re-shaping them as inputs for players in various practical games. Like the sentinels, the effectors will need to have close associations with these audiences. Even more than the sentinels, effectors need to be participants in those other practices. This does not mean they have to be inside players. Maxine Green, to take a well known example, is not a school teacher, but she has an audience among school teachers, because she communicates not only in scholarly journals and books, but directly to teachers, in many ways. Ken Howe and Barry Bull are not public officials who set policy. But they are policy influencers because they communicate directly within the policy process. These, and many others, are our effectors.
Sentinels and effectors are engaged scholars. They do not merely make scholarly communications about the real world. The sentinels make scholarly communications based on a direct, hands-on, engagement with it. The effectors make communications outside the world of scholarship, based on direct, hands-on, intimate knowledge of scholarly processes and results, including of course, their own scholarship. Importantly, the effectors need not be card carrying, university-based, professional scholars. Maxine Green's audiences are attuned to philosophy, and some of her listeners are equipped to make philosophical inputs in the insider games they play in schools and public agencies.
Here is a question about engaged scholars: should the sentinels and the effectors be the same people? Perhaps sometimes, because both will require engagement with these external practitioners and so will be positioned to speak with them. But it is a different talent to shape worldly news in the terms of scholarship and to shape scholarly results in worldly terms. There is no necessary correlation of these talents.
So here is the line-up of the team:
Sentinels, who monitor various educational practices and report to the field in philosophical communications;
In-fielders, who bring inputs from other branches of philosophy into philosophy of education;
Inter-fielders, who bring inputs from other scholarly disciplines into the field;
Intra-fielders, who use inputs from sentinels and other intra-fielders, in-fielders and interfielders, and others, to generate core works of philosophy of education;
Meta-philosophers of education, who reflect on the field and its methods and connections to other fields of knowledge and practice;
and Effectors, who digest and synthesize the processes and results of the field of philosophy of education, in communications from the field to other practices.
The sentinels and effectors are engaged directly in the scholarship of engagement. To engage is to associate, to connect, to share.
The intra-fielders, who write about the practices engaged scholars are engaged in, are not themselves typically engaged.
People without sense organs or arms and legs are severely disabled, regardless of the condition of their brains. The same can be said of most academic fields, no matter how abstract their core works.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Dewey's Experimental Logic and the Scholarship of Engagement
John Dewey's experimental logic is neatly outlined in the three chapters on the stages of thought in Studies in Logical Theory. These three stages are useful in thinking about the scholarship of engagement.
On Dewey's account, actors are caught up in the stream of human events. Some of these are moving along without much friction, and thought is primarily qualitative and intuitive. Others are meeting with resistance or generating conflict. At this first stage, thought is more or less effortless and it not itself the main focus of consciousness. (Dewey will later call this stage that of primary experience).
But hesitation from resistance or conflict brings thinking to the center of consciousness. Thought sets out to map the situation, define problems, establish inquiries, gather data, consider the relevance of on-the-shelf knowledge, and draw and confirm conclusions. (Dewey will later call this secondary experience).
This second stage ends when thought knows where it stands. The third stage begins as the results of thought are placed back on the table of primary experience, along with other factors considered relevant by actors in the situation, as resources for finding a way beyond hesitation, beyond resistance and conflict. The results of thought can then be evaluated as instruments in restoring balance, in restoring the flow of experiernce.
In Logic: the Theory of Inquiry, Dewey considered the institutional setting of thought. The research university is the primary institutional home of the second stage of thought. In disciplined inquiry thought generates its own problems, which generate new lines of inquiry or even entirely new disciplines. Logic, epistemology, statistics, research methodology, are all among these tertiary contexts of thought -- thought serving those other areas of thought that serve primary experience.
The ramifications of thought within the university are vast and unpredictable. However, the results of these tertiary disciplines must be judged by how well they open up and contribute to work in e.g., sociology, psychology, and geography. Just as sociology is the study of society and its problems and conflicts, logic is the theory of inquiries in the various fields and disciplines. And the results of thought in these secondary disciplines must similarly be judged by how well they contribute to restoring the flow of primary experience by aiding actors in moving beyond hesitation and getting on with their affairs without resistance and conflict.
As Dewey puts it, the test of thought lies outside of thought. That is, work within university disciplines is subjected to a double test. First it must meet the staandards imposed by the approved methods within the discipline. The work does not yield "results" until that happens. But then these results themselves must be tested in the flow of experience that lies on the other side of the second stage of thought. It is in this sense that knowledge is good only if it works in experience.
This framework assigns two roles for the scholarship of engagement.
On the input side, problems framed for inquiry must be sensitive at some point, and in some way, to the real world needs that give rise to disciplined thought. There must, in other words, be a scholarship of engagement at the input point, at the border between the first stage of thought and the second, that influences the research agenda. Scholarship regarding the economics of the world food supply, in other words, must be alive to the doubts, hesitations, resistances and conflicts which make the food situation unbalanced or disturbed. There must be scholars in the field, so to speak, with in-person, face to face knowledge of farmers, hungry people, refugees, multi-national corporate decision makers, non-governmental organizations and social movement activists.
There also has to be a scholarship of engagement at the output side. This is a scholarship of translating academic knowledge into knowledge resources for practical ends, working with knowledge users, discovering what is useful and what is notin practice. And then communicating those discoveries back into the academy in such a way as to modify the research agenda so that subsequent academic work won't remain sterile and irrelevant.
The test of primary experience does not apply to each and every inquiry within academia. At the input stage it is the research agenda that is subject to this test. At the output stage it is the collective results of a field that are tested in this way. Within academia, that is, within the second stage of thought, there are all manner of internal inquiries, which may arguably be necessary to take up the problems of the world and move towards potentially useful conclusions confirmed by accepted methods. But if academic knowledge is to be more than a sterile game, it requires a scholarship of engagement to test its worth in primary experience and redirect it if it fails that test.
On Dewey's account, actors are caught up in the stream of human events. Some of these are moving along without much friction, and thought is primarily qualitative and intuitive. Others are meeting with resistance or generating conflict. At this first stage, thought is more or less effortless and it not itself the main focus of consciousness. (Dewey will later call this stage that of primary experience).
But hesitation from resistance or conflict brings thinking to the center of consciousness. Thought sets out to map the situation, define problems, establish inquiries, gather data, consider the relevance of on-the-shelf knowledge, and draw and confirm conclusions. (Dewey will later call this secondary experience).
This second stage ends when thought knows where it stands. The third stage begins as the results of thought are placed back on the table of primary experience, along with other factors considered relevant by actors in the situation, as resources for finding a way beyond hesitation, beyond resistance and conflict. The results of thought can then be evaluated as instruments in restoring balance, in restoring the flow of experiernce.
In Logic: the Theory of Inquiry, Dewey considered the institutional setting of thought. The research university is the primary institutional home of the second stage of thought. In disciplined inquiry thought generates its own problems, which generate new lines of inquiry or even entirely new disciplines. Logic, epistemology, statistics, research methodology, are all among these tertiary contexts of thought -- thought serving those other areas of thought that serve primary experience.
The ramifications of thought within the university are vast and unpredictable. However, the results of these tertiary disciplines must be judged by how well they open up and contribute to work in e.g., sociology, psychology, and geography. Just as sociology is the study of society and its problems and conflicts, logic is the theory of inquiries in the various fields and disciplines. And the results of thought in these secondary disciplines must similarly be judged by how well they contribute to restoring the flow of primary experience by aiding actors in moving beyond hesitation and getting on with their affairs without resistance and conflict.
As Dewey puts it, the test of thought lies outside of thought. That is, work within university disciplines is subjected to a double test. First it must meet the staandards imposed by the approved methods within the discipline. The work does not yield "results" until that happens. But then these results themselves must be tested in the flow of experience that lies on the other side of the second stage of thought. It is in this sense that knowledge is good only if it works in experience.
This framework assigns two roles for the scholarship of engagement.
On the input side, problems framed for inquiry must be sensitive at some point, and in some way, to the real world needs that give rise to disciplined thought. There must, in other words, be a scholarship of engagement at the input point, at the border between the first stage of thought and the second, that influences the research agenda. Scholarship regarding the economics of the world food supply, in other words, must be alive to the doubts, hesitations, resistances and conflicts which make the food situation unbalanced or disturbed. There must be scholars in the field, so to speak, with in-person, face to face knowledge of farmers, hungry people, refugees, multi-national corporate decision makers, non-governmental organizations and social movement activists.
There also has to be a scholarship of engagement at the output side. This is a scholarship of translating academic knowledge into knowledge resources for practical ends, working with knowledge users, discovering what is useful and what is notin practice. And then communicating those discoveries back into the academy in such a way as to modify the research agenda so that subsequent academic work won't remain sterile and irrelevant.
The test of primary experience does not apply to each and every inquiry within academia. At the input stage it is the research agenda that is subject to this test. At the output stage it is the collective results of a field that are tested in this way. Within academia, that is, within the second stage of thought, there are all manner of internal inquiries, which may arguably be necessary to take up the problems of the world and move towards potentially useful conclusions confirmed by accepted methods. But if academic knowledge is to be more than a sterile game, it requires a scholarship of engagement to test its worth in primary experience and redirect it if it fails that test.
Writing to Make a Difference and Change the World
Tired of writing to hear your own voice? No longer excited to see your name in print and want something more?
Two books offer advice about how to make a difference and change the world. Both address the concerns of engaged scholars.
The first is Writing a Book that Makes a Difference, by Philip Gerard. It's designed to help you find your own big idea, check out its worthiness, develop it, and connect to the reader. Written in 2000, it does not touch on the new media formats such as blogs and e-books. It is strictly about writing books.
The second is Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher, author of (among other influential change books) Reviving Ophelia. Pipher's book is to my eye simpler and more direct, perhaps because she devotes a lot of attention to the sorts of simple and direct communications found in blogs, short articles, and op ed pieces.
If you want to un-learn the writing habits of academia and learn new ones that allow you to connect and make a difference try one or both of these valuable guides.
Two books offer advice about how to make a difference and change the world. Both address the concerns of engaged scholars.
The first is Writing a Book that Makes a Difference, by Philip Gerard. It's designed to help you find your own big idea, check out its worthiness, develop it, and connect to the reader. Written in 2000, it does not touch on the new media formats such as blogs and e-books. It is strictly about writing books.
The second is Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher, author of (among other influential change books) Reviving Ophelia. Pipher's book is to my eye simpler and more direct, perhaps because she devotes a lot of attention to the sorts of simple and direct communications found in blogs, short articles, and op ed pieces.
If you want to un-learn the writing habits of academia and learn new ones that allow you to connect and make a difference try one or both of these valuable guides.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
The Scholarship of Engagement
At this past Wednesday's workshop of the Dewey Society's Commission on Social Issues, A.G. Rud (Purdue University, and editor of the Dewey Society's scholarly journal Education and Culture) brought our attention to recent work on 'the scholarship of engagement'. This notion owes its recent popularity and prestige to the work of Ernest Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
In Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate (New York: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990) Boyer argued for a broad understanding of scholarship. He offered ways of balancing four general areas of scholarship: discovery, integration of knowledge, teaching, and service.
As Boyer explained in "The scholarship of engagement" in the Journal of Public Outreach 1,1,11-20, 1996), this kind of scholarship fits primarily into the service category; professors draw upon their own discoveries and syntheses of knowledge, as well as those of their peers, in addressing community issues.
In the Commission's Workshop we discussed the problem of providing incentives for members of the Dewey Society to join in working on the Society's explicit social engagement mission. We agreed that one way would be to frame up their contributions (for example, White Papers on Issues) as 'proper' scholarship subject to peer review.
It turns out that we were re-inventing the wheel! The National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement exists to assist colleges and universities in providing peer review and quality assessment of engaged scholarship for tenure and promotion decisions. Universities have to request this service from the National Review Board in a timely fashion, and the Board will locate appropriate peer reviewers and provide them with guidelines for evaluation.
Purdue has actively embraced the engagement mission. It would be great to see every prestigious institution of higher education do this as well. Speak to your department chairs and deans, and ask them to make the case for this sort of scholarship with the provosts, presidents and trustees. The guidelines and services of the National Board eliminate many of the clouds of uncertainty surrounding this practice.
The Review Board can be found at http://schoe.coe.uga.edu
and a very good bibliography on the scholarship of engagement is presented at:
http://schoe.coe.uga.edu/resources/readings.html
In Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate (New York: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990) Boyer argued for a broad understanding of scholarship. He offered ways of balancing four general areas of scholarship: discovery, integration of knowledge, teaching, and service.
As Boyer explained in "The scholarship of engagement" in the Journal of Public Outreach 1,1,11-20, 1996), this kind of scholarship fits primarily into the service category; professors draw upon their own discoveries and syntheses of knowledge, as well as those of their peers, in addressing community issues.
In the Commission's Workshop we discussed the problem of providing incentives for members of the Dewey Society to join in working on the Society's explicit social engagement mission. We agreed that one way would be to frame up their contributions (for example, White Papers on Issues) as 'proper' scholarship subject to peer review.
It turns out that we were re-inventing the wheel! The National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement exists to assist colleges and universities in providing peer review and quality assessment of engaged scholarship for tenure and promotion decisions. Universities have to request this service from the National Review Board in a timely fashion, and the Board will locate appropriate peer reviewers and provide them with guidelines for evaluation.
Purdue has actively embraced the engagement mission. It would be great to see every prestigious institution of higher education do this as well. Speak to your department chairs and deans, and ask them to make the case for this sort of scholarship with the provosts, presidents and trustees. The guidelines and services of the National Board eliminate many of the clouds of uncertainty surrounding this practice.
The Review Board can be found at http://schoe.coe.uga.edu
and a very good bibliography on the scholarship of engagement is presented at:
http://schoe.coe.uga.edu/resources/readings.html
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Liveblogging from AERA in NYC
The Commission met today with about 25 people in attendance. Len Waks and Craig Cunningham ran a smooth and tight meeting. We discussed ways in which we could enact some of the Deweyan social agenda, following up from last year's meeting. All participants were encouraged to read this blog and to encourage other JDS members to do so. More later...back to walking the streets of Manhattan...
Friday, March 21, 2008
Social Networks and Public Issues
David Brooks, the conservative columnist at the New York Times, offers a vision of netrworks of government facilitated social entrepreneurs setting to work on intractable social issues including poverty and college access.
In "Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders" he paints a vision of data-driven, nerdy, Bill Gates lookalikes attacking problems government agencies cannot solve.
This is the image of the public-private partnership in the so-called social sector that Peter Drucker promoted and Al Gore labeled "re-inventing government".
Every progressive voice for change simply has to come to terms with this image: supporting it and contributing to it, or critiquing or de-bunking it. It is the new trend in public thought. It is not going away any time soon. Look for some version of this from both national political parties.
In "Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders" he paints a vision of data-driven, nerdy, Bill Gates lookalikes attacking problems government agencies cannot solve.
This is the image of the public-private partnership in the so-called social sector that Peter Drucker promoted and Al Gore labeled "re-inventing government".
Every progressive voice for change simply has to come to terms with this image: supporting it and contributing to it, or critiquing or de-bunking it. It is the new trend in public thought. It is not going away any time soon. Look for some version of this from both national political parties.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
"Bud The Teacher" has Moved. Plus: Troublesome Note on Student Disruption in AP Science.
who have followed the musings of Bud The Teacher will want to know that the blog has moved and has a new URL: http://http://budtheteacher.com/blog/
ON March 15th Bud passed along a troublesome note from a science teacher:
Classroom Climate Disruption. Literally.
ON March 15th Bud passed along a troublesome note from a science teacher:
Classroom Climate Disruption. Literally.
I am very concerned about a small group of AP Environmental Science students (3) who have taken an aggressive stand opposing my teaching of climate change. I already teach it from the perspective of “here’s the data, figure it out” but they think that I made the data up. I showed them where it came from (NASA and NOAA) and they think it is a conspiracy by the left wing to infiltrate and brainwash the American public.
Normally, I would let it go but these kids are being disruptive and belligerent to the point that I have had to refer them to the administration.
NCLB and Suburban Relief
As many of us knew all along, NCLB was a "get tough" marketing campaign of the major political parties. There are few political strategies better at generating knee jerk reactions than school and teacher bashing. NCLB had it all: tough talk, "accountability", guarantees of free tutoring and private education to those trapped in "failing schools".
Now it turns out that too many schools are failing. NCLB administrators in the Department of Education are scrambling to weaken its draconian provisions to forestall a mass revolt by parents and school districts, especially in affluent suburbs, whose award-winning schools are labeled as "failing" by NCLB.
As the New York Times reports in "U.S. Eases No Child Law As Applied to Some States,", "The Bush administration, acknowledging that the federal No Child Left Behind law is diagnosing too many public schools as failing, said Tuesday that it would relax the law’s provisions for some states, allowing them to distinguish schools with a few problems from those that need major surgery."
“We need triage,” said Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education.
"Under the new program, the federal Department of Education will give up to 10 states permission to focus reform efforts on schools that are drastically underperforming and intervene less forcefully in schools that are raising the test scores of most students but struggling with one group . . ."
Now it turns out that too many schools are failing. NCLB administrators in the Department of Education are scrambling to weaken its draconian provisions to forestall a mass revolt by parents and school districts, especially in affluent suburbs, whose award-winning schools are labeled as "failing" by NCLB.
As the New York Times reports in "U.S. Eases No Child Law As Applied to Some States,", "The Bush administration, acknowledging that the federal No Child Left Behind law is diagnosing too many public schools as failing, said Tuesday that it would relax the law’s provisions for some states, allowing them to distinguish schools with a few problems from those that need major surgery."
“We need triage,” said Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education.
"Under the new program, the federal Department of Education will give up to 10 states permission to focus reform efforts on schools that are drastically underperforming and intervene less forcefully in schools that are raising the test scores of most students but struggling with one group . . ."
Home School Athletics Institutionalized
Tha home school movement is becomeing more established.
Only a few years ago a parent choosing to home-school his or her children was invariably asked "How will they meet and interact with other children?" Often there was no good answer.
Then homeschool associations formed in most metropolitan regions. But they didn't meet the needs of many parents. Some evangelical Christian homeschool families, for example. didn't want their children associating with more liberal Christians, much less free thinkers or "godless hippies". And the feeling was mutual.
As the movement has grown, it has generated new solutions to the problem of access to social experiences.
The New York Times, in "Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team"now reports on the growth of athletic leagues for himeschoolers. Some of the teams are very good; some players have attained star status and are being actively recruited by the top college sports programs.
One point to notice: the homeschool teams are now scheduling games against public schools.
A larger network of educational providers is thus being recognized, and both conventional schools and home-schools are emerging as nodes in this network.
Only a few years ago a parent choosing to home-school his or her children was invariably asked "How will they meet and interact with other children?" Often there was no good answer.
Then homeschool associations formed in most metropolitan regions. But they didn't meet the needs of many parents. Some evangelical Christian homeschool families, for example. didn't want their children associating with more liberal Christians, much less free thinkers or "godless hippies". And the feeling was mutual.
As the movement has grown, it has generated new solutions to the problem of access to social experiences.
The New York Times, in "Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team"now reports on the growth of athletic leagues for himeschoolers. Some of the teams are very good; some players have attained star status and are being actively recruited by the top college sports programs.
One point to notice: the homeschool teams are now scheduling games against public schools.
A larger network of educational providers is thus being recognized, and both conventional schools and home-schools are emerging as nodes in this network.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Workshop March 26 in new York
The Commission on Social Issues of the Dewey Society is charged to facilitate communications among members of the Dewey Society and the public on pressing social, cultural and educational issues.
Today’s front-burner issues include rising racial re-segregation, ubiquitous high-stakes testing, undermining of public education by charter and voucher plans, and the attack against evolution in science education. Tomorrow will bring fresh assaults against the ideals of progressive democratic education for all.
The Commission will hold its second annual workshop at the JDS meeting in conjunction with AERA in New York on Wednesday, March 26, 12:25pm to 1:55pm at the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square, Room: Marquis Ballroom, Salon A, 9th Floor
Please attend and participate in this workshop.
Last year more than 30 members of the Society engaged in a lively and productive conversation about how the Society could assist members in contributing to the public discourse on education, society and culture in the spirit of John Dewey.
One of the by-products of that session was the founding of the blog Social Issues. A second was President Jim Garrison’s decision to select topics of broad public interest for this year’s John Dewey annual lecture and annual symposium at AERA. The Commission for Social Issues and the Dewey Society are also thinking about sponsoring a series of “Progress Reports” – white papers on current and emerging issues accessible to policy leaders and public audiences. Your help is essential to the success of this venture.
Please come to the workshop and assist the society in moving beyond its great success as an interllectual forum so that it can add its voice to public conversation.
Today’s front-burner issues include rising racial re-segregation, ubiquitous high-stakes testing, undermining of public education by charter and voucher plans, and the attack against evolution in science education. Tomorrow will bring fresh assaults against the ideals of progressive democratic education for all.
The Commission will hold its second annual workshop at the JDS meeting in conjunction with AERA in New York on Wednesday, March 26, 12:25pm to 1:55pm at the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square, Room: Marquis Ballroom, Salon A, 9th Floor
Please attend and participate in this workshop.
Last year more than 30 members of the Society engaged in a lively and productive conversation about how the Society could assist members in contributing to the public discourse on education, society and culture in the spirit of John Dewey.
One of the by-products of that session was the founding of the blog Social Issues. A second was President Jim Garrison’s decision to select topics of broad public interest for this year’s John Dewey annual lecture and annual symposium at AERA. The Commission for Social Issues and the Dewey Society are also thinking about sponsoring a series of “Progress Reports” – white papers on current and emerging issues accessible to policy leaders and public audiences. Your help is essential to the success of this venture.
Please come to the workshop and assist the society in moving beyond its great success as an interllectual forum so that it can add its voice to public conversation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)